“A pot?” I grin, thumb stroking across the inside of her wrist. “What’s so special about a pot?”
Sloan purses her lips. “What’s so special about an igneous rock?”
“Well, they are formed when magma or lava solidify, so some might say that’s significantly more interesting than a plain old pot.”
She lifts her chin. “Who says it’s a plain old pot? It could have been used for any number of things.”
“Was it?”
Her eyes narrow. “They haven’t been able to determine its exact function yet.”
“Fascinating.” I raise a brow and tug on her wrist again.
Sloan glances at the pamphlet before dropping it onto my bed beside all the other scattered pieces of paper. “I’ve been talking a lot,” she says softly, a wrinkle cutting across her nose I’d like to smooth away with my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” I tell her.
“Are you sure?” she asks with a sniff, eyes getting bright in the way they only do when she’s going to cry. “It seems like you’re trying to get me to lay down so maybe I’ll shut up and stop talking about these stupid digs.”
“I have been trying to get you to lay down. But it’s not because I want you to stop talking, Sloan.” I press my thumb down, andI can feel the faint beat of her heart in her pulse. “And I’m certainly not interested in making you shut up. I’d actually like you to make quite a bit of noise.”
She blinks, full lips parting while a pink blush rises on her cheeks. But she tips her chin up again, that funny streak of stubbornness shining through. “How lewd.”
I grin, bringing her wrist to my mouth, pressing a kiss there. “I’m twenty and you’re the most beautiful person I’ll probably ever see in real life. I can get lewder.”
She gives me a flat look this time. “Talon and Jay could come home.”
“Talon and Jay fucked off to the movies,” I say against her skin.
She blinks again with a tiny swallow.
She looks a bit nervous. Not because of me. We’ve got a rule about boundaries. She’s clear about them—best day of my life when she took her clothes off in front of me for the first time and we didn’t do anything but lie there.
She’s beautiful, radiant, probably made from the sun and the stars, but it wasn’t because of that.
It was the way her eyelashes fluttered softly, her lips curved into this little shy smile and her shoulders relaxed. How she blinked slowly. How her hands painted these patterns across my chest, arms, and back when we lay there, alone in the dark except for the moon peeking through the window, whispering quietly, doing nothing more than laughing and kissing.
It was the way she was entirely, utterly relaxed. Comfortable. Quiet and at ease.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more worthy of anything—more like a man—than I did that night and I probably never will again.
I always ask Sloan permission to do anything, and when she says stop, I stop and take ten steps back. But I know her enoughnow to be able to read these different subtleties in her, the way the font of her changes in the shifts of her body language.
She’s nervous about something her brain just told her.
I hold my hands up in submission and jerk my chin towards the brochure again. “How long are these field schools?”
“Uhm. It depends. This one was two weeks. But some of the European ones are a month.” She chews on her bottom lip, glancing towards the stacks strewn across my bed.
“A month?” I echo. “What’s so interesting you’re digging through the dirt for that long?”
She folds her arms, sitting up straighter. “Says the guy who goes to school to study rocks.”
“I’d miss you,” I tell her, voice low.
“It’s been like, two months.” She rolls her eyes, but she glances back up at me, and there’s this tiny bloom of hopefulness there, like when the sky turns blue first thing in the morning and you’ve got no idea what’s coming for you—a day that could be anything at all.
“I can’t miss you after two months?” I ask, leaning forward with a grin and plucking the brochure from her hand.
